Dear Naseer Sahab,

I am immensely grateful to you for endorsing my detailed commentary without raising a single question. I had done it on an emergency basis working through late hours of night as I was planning to go on a vacation the next morning and I had just seen Prof. Naim’s comment raising a seemingly valid question. Even during the vacation, I checked for his comment but my disappointment only increased as he never responded. My object was to win Prof. Naeem Sahab over to my side, but in good stroke of luck I won you over as only one with depth of Qur’anic language and insight of history could appreciate my commentary.

As you will see my answer to his question was based primarily on the evidence of the Qur’an, but it is so unfortunate that people who pose to be scholarly (I mean Rational Mohammed Yunus) , dismiss the role of the Qur'an as a first hand window to some of the key events of the Prophet's era. They interpret the Qur'anic allusions on the basis of his classical biography. But they not know the latter is based primarily on the work of Ibn Ishaq, whose work cannot be regarded as a historical document as expounded in my jt. exegetic work under posting at the website.

If a person of Prof Naeem's status does not understand the Qur'an cannot be judged on the basis of the events of any corridor of history let alone its early decades, I am simply speechless. Then, we have Sultan Shahin Sahab struggling through late hours of to develop a theology of peace and harmony out of the annals of Islamic theological history. It is like searching the whole in the part, or the eternal in the temporal.

Islam as enshrined in the Qur’an must be understood on its own right - based on the Qur’an. All its interpretation in the post Prophetic era only represent human efforts to fit the Qur’an into the ground realities of the era by ijma. Hadith, Sharia ruling and what have you. If the intellectuals of Islam fail to grasp this axiomatic truth, little can be achieved except controversy and polemics. This is the primary reason that I do not get the inner urge to post comments for the argument today how to fit a square peg into a round hole, an argument can never end.

Thank You again.

Islamic Ideology ( 12 Aug 2015, NewAgeIslam.Com)

The Notion of Jizyah In The Light Of the Qur’an’s Holistic Message and Historical Context

Loading..

Loading..